The Trackers

by Charles Frazier

I tried hard to take a smart-aleck tone toward everything, but really I took the work itself as seriously as Baptist missionaries sharing the gospel. I had a job in a jobless time doing what I loved and what I had some talent and a lot of education to do. And the work I was planning could possibly mean something to an audience, however small, into a future perhaps beyond my span, however long or short, bright or dim.

The look seemed inhuman until I realized that just because I might never have felt or thought whatever passed through Faro’s mind and body in that flicker of time did not mean it wasn’t human.

at some point you don’t have a choice. You go on. Life’s like a movie, one direction. Forward.

But out on the road, when people die they just go away.

For long stretches, you could believe we were still the imagined country whose overall movement was steadily and surely upward, like those moments in Fred and Ginger movies when everyone wears tuxedos and ball gowns, and the dancing is only lightly regulated by the laws of gravity.

You find out the who, what, when, where. I’ll figure the why for myself. In other words, do the boring due-diligence shit I should have done before I married her but was too crazy in love to think about.

since I’m a lifelong Floridian, I don’t really know what living in a sane state would be like. No point of comparison.

Eve said, We could keep going. The road never ends. At least that’s what some of us used to say. It hit me wrong. I said, Yes, it does. It fucking absolutely does end. That’s fake, crazy hobo wisdom or real estate salesman wisdom or politician bullshit. When people come all the way across the continent and see the Pacific, they usually know for sure the road has ended, maybe in a way they hadn’t planned on, but that particular dream or fantasy of running away forever from your problems is done. You can’t keep running west forever. Whatever they thought they were running toward or away from, all the way from the Tidewater or Plymouth Rock or the Lost Colony, they know that dream of freedom forever has ended when the road stops in front of them and there’s nothing ahead but thousands of miles of water. —Val, you’re in a different conversation. Two-lane ribbons of pavement are not what we’re talking about. —Not what I was talking about either.

I’d already learned you’re swimming against the river if you’re looking to force justice on a world where it’s an unnatural idea. Sometimes you’ve got to invent things as you go along.

Faro fussed with the fire, revising the geometry of wood until it suited him,